We’re #9! Completely Arbitrarily!

You may have missed this recent news, but “06880” did not:

Westport ranks #9 on a list of “America’s Top 15 Economic Power Towns.”

That’s right. Our humble burg trails only #1 McLean, Virginia, Weston (Massachusetts, not Connecticut — whew!) and 6 other places as — well, something.

To compile the list, SpareFoot — – an Austin, Texas-based company that boasts “the largest inventory of storage units in the U.S.” — examined every place in America with 50,000 residents or fewer, that also happens to be home to at least one Fortune 500 company. More than 120 towns fit into that category, meaning nearly 10% of all candidates had a chance of making the list.

(Can you guess Westport’s Fortune 500 company? I couldn’t.)

SpareFoot then applied 6 criteria to rank the “economic power” of Fortune 500 towns:

• Home ownership rate (Westport’s: 86.2%)
• Median household income ($152,586)
• Local unemployment rate (7.4%)
• Percentage of residents living in poverty (3.7%)
• Ratio of median home value to median income (7.2)
• Median value of owner-occupied homes ($1.1 million)

So, to summarize: A random self-storage business decided to create an “economic power” index; chose arbitrarily to limit it to places with Fortune 500 headquarters, but also arbitrarily with a certain limited population; came up with 6 totally random categories, having absolutely nothing to do with the original arbitrary premise of Fortune 500 companies, and then tried to convince “06880” to run the story.

Hey. It worked.

So what Fortune 500 company is headquartered in Westport? Terex.